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Patty Hearst
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There
are two distinct ways of understanding the emotional charge of obsession in cinema – two ways virtually
polarised into a positive and negative, or light and dark, opposition. (1) The
first way is one that basically derives from Romanticism and all its heirs
(including the jolly half of Surrealism). Here, obsession in film is grasped
for its positive, powerful, even revolutionary potential: obsession as the
figure for any strong, liberating emotion, be it for a person, a thing, or a
political cause. Romanticism as an ethos is about soul, embrace, contact, empathy. Obsessive love in the Romantic
vein would be about getting outside of yourself and moving toward an Other – a
perpetually generative and unstoppable “outward turn” as distinct from the
spiralling, crippling inward turn that obsession (in life as in fiction) so
often takes, as in the scenario of possessive jealousy.
Romantic
art – which finds its 20th century apotheosis in Hollywood cinema’s
musicals and melodramas – believes in, and tries to awaken and direct, reserves
of soul-energy, of yearning and dreaming, within each viewer. Anticipating Sigmund
Freud, Romanticism conjured human beings as driven – filled with natural drives toward pleasure, ecstasy, happiness. Romanticism
demands that your heart go out to it, and that your mind grasp – in the form of
an overwhelming epiphany – the longing and torment of others’ minds. But
Romantic art is not all fairy-tale positivity; it is often suffused with a keen
awareness of the experience of pain, of the obstacles that the social world
(via its means of repression) puts in the way of fulfilment. It knows –
sometimes only half-knows – that the life-drive can so easily be twisted into a
death-drive.
It
is hard to put a word to the opposite of Romanticism, but let’s suggest
Nihilism, and evoke (for example) the very popular terrain of cynical, black
comedy. As a negation of Romanticism, this dark viewpoint believes that most of
the dreams of soul or love contact – and their promises of liberation – are, at
best, amusing diversions and, at worst, horrible shams. In place of an
unbridled pleasure principle, it evokes the sad and murky rigours of a reality-principle
which is our final, our inescapable lot.
But
then, Nihilism is not necessarily a sad or even melancholic attitude. It
achieves its own fierce clarity, and generates its own energies. Not the
florid, Other-seeking energies of Romanticism, but something often just as
intense: the sensations that traverse the disconnected, atomised, alienated ego
locked in on itself. Some versions of the existentialist dream can be evoked
here: a standpoint, a way of being in the world that takes as given the general
futility of life and the emptiness of one-to-one or individual-to-society
relations, and moves through the mess from there – alienated but free. Because
freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose! Obsession, here, would
correspond to the whirring and buzzing of internal physiological circuitry, the
fleeting brushes with the external world, the weightless sophistry of idle
speculation.
Personally,
I incline easily toward the Romantic attitude, but I was urged toward a fuller
understanding of its opposite number by Paul Schrader’s extraordinary Patty Hearst, a film virtually ignored
on its initial release by audiences and reviewers alike. I suspect that this
was a hard product to sell, and out of its time (before or after, it’s hard to
say): corrosively, relentlessly black, its energies happen out on an orbit
terrifyingly far away from normal comic-dramatic viewing modes and
expectations. J. Hoberman called it a “flop”, but goes on, tellingly, to note
that Hearst’s “tale inspires a certain lysergic queasiness, a horror vacui – there’s a haunting
feeling of emptiness”. (2)
In
fact, Patty Hearst is an extreme
example of mainstream experimentalism, and its mood of emptiness is no
accident. A totally expressionist film in the grand style, it contains hardly a
single typical or classical shot – few redundancies or repetitions on any level.
Although it bears some kinship with the shock-tabloid cinema of Samuel Fuller,
the most extreme 1950s B-film work of Phil Karlson or Joseph H. Lewis, and the
energetic excesses of Brian De Palma, it is never simply hyper-styled fireworks
for the sake of it. As in Expressionism, all the stylistic distortions spring
from the progressive deformations of the main character’s point of view.
There’s
the rub. What makes Patty Hearst such
a dark, unsettling film is that it asks you to identify with someone who is, in
every respect, totally null and void – a point blank. We have no idea why Patty
(Natasha Richardson) does anything, and neither does she. Her subjectivity is
not brimming with drives and dreams, but is completely empty from the word go.
The whole movement of the story, in showing you the brutal ways in which her
character and psyche are made over by her Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA)
captors, is to eventually suggest that it never was, and never will be, any
different.
The
film is a Lacanian nightmare: the “I” or ego of Patty Hearst is never anything
more than a passing illusion courtesy of someone else. The recurring
melodramatic imagery (Patty as a blindfolded child; being buried alive)
stresses that, everywhere, at all times, she is blinded, pulverised, atomised. About
the first 20 minutes take her point-of-view within a locked, darkened cabinet –
a suitably Gothic metaphor for the blank self. She is never anything but a
pawn, or a projection, in everybody else’s games – whether being a dutiful
daughter, acting as a fervent revolutionary terrorist collaborator, or being
subjected to a trial-by-media. (A detail in the end credit roll notes the
publication of a book titled My Search
for Patty Hearst by someone she had never spoken to!) As a female pawn at
the hands of men, Patty’s subjection is particularly unpleasant: she refers to
herself with startling clarity at one point as a “tight sperm receptacle”.
In
a fictional world where everything equals out and thus cancels out in this way,
no values or beliefs are seen as inherently more worthy than any others. The
black humour of the film springs from Schrader’s vision that everyone’s dreams
are just mad, psychotic projections: the revolutionary fervour of terrorism is
rendered (and this is doubtless an index of Schrader’s political conservatism)
as, in Hoberman’s description, “a grotesque acid trip”. (3) The SLA (incarnated
by an ensemble including William Forsythe, Frances Fisher and Ving Rhames) are
an unlovely bunch, running on WASP guilt and horrendously double-bound sexual freedoms
– spurred into action by fanatical visions and recanting, in a moment, their
brotherly/sisterly empathies with the oppressed (those lousy, thieving
Chicanos!). The psychic rule of all this projection becomes clear: if you can’t
somehow dominate someone else’s consciousness, you will simply become the next
colonised, duped subject.
In
many ways, and on many levels, Patty
Hearst is a furiously obsessive exploration of the texture of alienation,
of emptiness in and between people – where the only operative drive is to
survive, to maintain a momentum, to keep one’s beleaguered organism at some
kind of equilibrium. Patty will become anyone or anything just to stay alive –
and as far as we can tell, she is sincere about every one of her roles. Here
the theme of the “presentation of self in everyday life”, insistent in recent
cinema and prefigured particularly by Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), spins into its blackest hole. Patty
Hearst forms a group with other, contemporaneous films that similarly
explore (with no particularly melancholic complaint about a generalised state
of alienation) a nihilistic texture: Philip Brophy’s Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat (1988), Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers (1988) and Luc Moullet’s mindboggling The Comedy of Work (1987).
In
place of Schrader’s bold, crazy, melodramatic structure, these films plunder
minimalist, repetitive, entropic forms: all are constructed out of the movement
of tiny, mechanical, banal, ritual gestures that form themselves into circuits
or systems. These systems run only in order to run down – to exhaust themselves
in some final, deathly spurt (Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts [1985] is the supreme embodiment of this ideal). In all these films, characters
or people are little more than the sum of actions performed or undertaken to
get through a particularly blank and tedious everyday reality. Not much stirs
within, apart from a vague desire to move around the available atomised
particles of nothingness.
Patty Hearst sets up
an expectation that it will be the story of a woman who moves from debutante
innocence and a state of exploitation to a condition of self-knowledge. In a
way, this does happen, but the outcome is hardly heroic or morally-socially
uplifting. Like Mary Lambert’s unfairly trashed Siesta (1987), Schrader’s film eventually creates a heroine who is
not a coherent self or centred subject, but a certain flash of energy, of
feeling. For Lambert, what persists is the intensity of love and hurt. For
Schrader and his writer Nicholas Kazan (who already massacred the patriarchal
family in At Close Range [1986]), what lasts is rage.
What Patty is privileged to learn – what others like her have never had the opportunity
to learn – is that she’s a nobody like everybody, alienated and abused. That is
what her voyage into the unknown teaches her.
It
is also her crime that she came to know it, that she lived to tell the tale.
The pivotal moment in Patty’s voyage of discovery is when she sees on TV the
evidence that her rescuers – the white knights of the patriarchal state – where
planning to kill her along with the SLA, rather than save her. She learns then
that all the games and gambits of her Others have only that one possible
outcome: the extinction of the one being played.
In The Last Temptation
of Christ (1988),
which Schrader scripted for Scorsese, Willem Dafoe as Jesus ends by rendering
on the cross, the famous Biblical line: “It is accomplished”. The line means
several things – not least of all it is a testament by Scorsese to himself, to
what he had to go through to get the film made. More profoundly, critics have
interpreted the line to be a reflection on the way the movie settles abruptly
on closure, having hitherto explored a more open-ended, veritably anti-Oedipal
wandering. But Oedipus is indeed where Scorsese’s film stops: with the cry of a
son to a father that, finally, he will accept his pre-given, pre-scripted role
in the scheme of things, the Book of History.
I
much prefer what Patty Hearst says to her ghostly, off-screen patriarch,
Randolph A. Hearst (Ermal Williamson): “Pardon my French, Dad, but fuck ‘em.
Fuck ‘em all”. It is a brave American movie these days that can end on a line
like that.
MORE Schrader: Affliction, Auto Focus, Blue Collar, The Comfort of Strangers, Light of Day, Touch
I love love – the love of couples, love in
melodrama, love for a cause. I go to the cinema for emotion. And this emotional
Utopianism is part of a politics – a soul politics. A yearning that busts the chains of repression. A magnificent
obsession that can also be a permanent revolution. back
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